roberta palma

KIDNEY TRANSPLANTS

In the 1930s doctors started testing a new procedure. Once believed to be impossible in medicine organ transplants are now a reality. Several groundbreaking surgeons worked on kidney transplants. They would take a healthy kidney from a living person or someone who had just passed away and put it into a patient who was close to death because of kidney failure. However these early surgeries had a big challenge: patients' immune systems would quickly see the new kidney as something strange and begin to attack it. Only a small number of patients lived beyond the first few days.